Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The Python Software Foundation is thrilled to support Kivy on their upcoming developer contest, the second of its kind. The contest begins by accepting entries, either for teams or individuals, on April 2. However, the topic of the contest won't be known at that time. On April 15, the Kivy Project releases the topic and the teams have one month to develop their applications, wrapping up on May 14.The organizers aim to "encourage and give developers an opportunity to learn more about Python and Kivy," through the contest. As Kivy is a cross-platform toolkit, they hope to see applications running not only on desktop operating systems, but also on mobile. The theme they plan won't be too limiting, so all platforms can join in the fun.Visual styling will be among the judging criteria, so they're hoping to see some good looking entries. "Without giving anything away, the ideas could range from a simple scientific calculator, to an alarm clock manager, a diary app, or a maths tutor," the organizers said."The PSF has been a big part of helping us grow by providing us sponsorship," they said of the $2000 USD granted to support the contest. Jessica McKellar, they said, was "a big part of helping us get this competition off the ground.""The project has been getting quite popular lately, especially with the increasing interest in mobile applications," they said of Kivy. Part of the attraction comes from being able to work with pure Python across all of the platforms, allowing developers to leverage the huge amount of code the Python community has made available.When it comes to Kivy's development, they're preparing a lot of new features for the next major release, especially support for SDL2 backends. Adding SDL support should make for a much more speedy experience on mobile platforms, and give them more flexibility overall. They're also putting some focus on some projects that surround Kivy, such as Plyer and Buildozer.If you're new to Python or Kivy, the organizers have created a level playing field that will allow both experienced and new programmers to partake. "Our judgement criteria will include not just areas of technical merit, but also a focus on great app ideas, user engagement, and use of Kivy features," they said."So come on dive in and make your first mobile app using Python facilitated by the Kivy framework!"